Shaboozey's Outlaw Cherie Lee: Country Concept Album — SkimNews
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- Shaboozey released "The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales," a 20-track concept album with narration from Jamie Foxx, Teyana Taylor and Sam Elliott, accompanied by a three-issue comic of the same name.
- "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" earned over 1.75bn Spotify streams after his guest spot on Beyoncé's 2024 "Cowboy Carter," becoming the biggest-selling country single of 2024 and at one point the joint longest-running US No 1 of all time.
- His 2024 album "Where I've Been, Isn't Where I'm Going" is still on the US chart 112 weeks after release, described by the review as the most successful sustained fusion of hip-hop and country.
- The new album features collaborations with Gunna ("High Noon"), Kehlani ("Bullets and Blades"), Leon Bridges ("Burn It Down") and Orville Peck, who closes with the traditional cowboy ballad "Streets of Laredo."
- Country concept albums have a deep tradition stretching from Marty Robbins' 1959 "Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs" and Johnny Cash's 1964 "Bitter Tears" to Willie Nelson's 1975 "Red Headed Stranger," regularly voted the greatest country album of all time.
- Shaboozey received three nominations at the Country Music Awards — at an event the review characterises as "traditionally resistant to artists of colour" — reinforcing his place alongside them as a Black artist who has broken through country music's gatekeepers.
Why it matters: By pivoting from a streaming-shattering pop-country single toward a 20-track pure-country concept album and earning three Country Music Awards nominations in the process, Shaboozey positions himself not as a one-hit curiosity but as a long-haul artist joining a canon that runs from Marty Robbins to Willie Nelson — a rare foothold for a Black artist in a historically guarded genre.
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